After reading Lex's hint about rolling the dice and flipping a coin, I decided to see whether Siri can generate random numbers. It can have Wolfram do it. You can speak "random number" (which it interprets as "random integer"), "random integer", or "random real". You can also specify ranges, such as "random number between ten and 100" or "random real between 20 and 30".

Over at Finer Things, David Chartier points out that Siri can help you play games of chance. Unfortunately, however, the virtual assistant can't necessarily help you win at said games. Still, you can use Siri when you need to flip a coin or roll a pair of dice.

Say "Flip a coin," and Siri will either announce that it's heads or tails. Ask Siri to "roll the dice," and you'll get a pair of numbers between one and six. You can't ask Siri to roll a single die. Or rather, you can, but you'll still get two numbers back.

Hardcore role playing game enthusiasts will need a separate app or actual dice hardware to roll dice with more than six sides; Siri's apparently not into D&D.

iOS 6 introduced Do Not Disturb, but some of us were annoyed by its implementation: Though the feature silenced iOS notification sounds while your iPhone or iPad were sleeping, those noises still blasted out when the device was in use. If that's not what you want to have happen, iOS 7 has the solution.

Armed with this hint, Do Not Disturb will empower you to use your iOS device in a room with sleeping people, or in a meeting where you're supposed to be paying attention, without fear that a bleep or bloop will bother those around you.

Head over to the Settings app, and tap on Do Not Disturb. Scroll down to the bottom of the screen, and set Silence to Always, instead of Only While iPhone Is Locked. From now on, Do Not Disturb works regardless of whether your iPhone is awake and in use, whenever the mode is enabled.

iOS 7's new design seemed to cause some spacing issues in Messages, especially on the iPhone. Where you formerly could see the full names of the people you texted, iOS 7 shows only a first name, or perhaps a first name and last initial. When you know as many Dans as I do—even as many Dan M.'s as I do—that just won't do.

There's a fix, though the setting isn't where you might expect.

In the Settings app, tap on Mail, Contacts, Calendars. and then scroll way down to the Contacts section. Under that header, tap on Short Name. For my purposes, I turned off both Short Name and Prefer Nicknames. Now, Messages shows the full names of the contacts I'm sending messages to, shortening the button labels at the top as necessary to make everything fit.

In iOS 7, Siri can toggle a lot of settings: Bluetooth, Airplane Mode, Wi-Fi, and more. And the virtual assistant also gives quick access to more granular settings.

Tell Siri something like, "Change the brightness," and the brightness slider will appear onscreen, ready for you to adjust. Of course, you could always simply drag up Control Center instead, but who doesn't like a virtual minion to do their brightness-adjusting bidding?

One powerful new feature in the Settings app lets you see how much data your apps are using over your iPhone's cellular connection. You can even block specific apps from accessing data over your cellular connection if you prefer, limiting them to Wi-Fi-based data access only.

To find the options, launch Settings, and tap on Cellular.

Scroll down past all the Personal Hotspot, Call Time, Cellular Data Usage, and other options, and you'll get to a Use Cellular Data For section.

The list is sorted alphabetically, unfortunately, and not by cellular data consumption. But you can see how much data each app has used over your iPhone's cellular connection, and use the green slider to disable certain apps from using cellular data at all.

You can tap on System Services to see how much cellular data is used by system components that you can't prevent from using the cellular connection, like DNS services, Time & Location, Siri, mapping, networking, and such.

You can reset the statistics with a button at the very bottom of the screen.

In iOS 6, you could tap the Edit button in Messages to delete or forward one or more messages from a text/iMessage conversation. There's no Edit button in iOS 7's version of Messages.

Here's the work around: Tap and hold on any speech bubble in your conversation. A popover menu appears. Tap on the More button, and now you're in editing mode. You can check as many messages as you'd like with the round checkboxes (checkcircles?) that appear, and then tap either the trash can icon at the bottom left, or the forward button at the bottom right.

There's also a Delete All button at the upper left to wipe out the entire conversation history from this editing mode.

The Maps app in iOS 6 and later offers turn-by-turn directions using Siri's voice. But most iPhone and iPad device owners don't know how to adjust the volume of that voice. It's not where you'd expect.

Fire up the Settings up, and scroll down until you find Maps. There, you'll see controls for disabling the app's voice, or making its volume Low, Medium, or Loud.